I do a lot of blog work, both for myself and clients. As such, I’ve ended up trying out pretty much every tool, software, and script related to blogging. The majority I throw away, while others have proved themselves invaluable to saving me time, making me more money, or just making blogging much easier. (Plugins mentioned are for the Wordpress blogging platform only)

Free Adult Blogger Tools

1. Windows Live Writer - I have tried a lot of remote blogging tools, because the last thing I really want to do is log into a bunch of Wordpress and Blogger blogs to do updates. I have tossed aside all but one - Microsoft’s Live Writer. This nifty piece of stand alone software is in its third part of beta testing and has a ton of great features to make posting to my blogs easy. It supports remote posting to most major blog platforms, easy tagging, timestamp editing, image handling, image uploads, pinging, and pretty much everything else you could ever want in a remote blog posting software. To clear up any confusion, I use this on my handwritten blogs - it does not do anything with RSS.

2. Custom Wordpress Install Zip - You can save yourself a little bit of time on every Wordpress install by putting together your own custom zip of plugins and themes you commonly use. This works well if you have a ton of plugins that you don’t want to upload after the fact, and it’s especially useful if you aren’t on a host with one click installs.

3. Thumblogger - is a free hosted blog service with a rather interesting blogging script that I like a great deal. Plus, it’s the brain child of Twan, who is an absolutely amazing, brilliant person with lots of free tools that are quite helpful (as you’ll see reading down this list).

4. Blog Submitter - I don’t tend to link outside of my network on my blogs, but Twan’s directories are the one place I’ll always submit to. Part of it is because they are all nice PR, but the other part is because he made a submitter that makes it quite easy to get listed.

5. Jace’s List of RSS Feeds - Jace is the man to go to for all things RSS - and this is his list of great RSS feeds from sponsors. Go sign up under him and get some great feeds for blog content!

6. Related Posts Plugin - This neat plugin shows a list of related posts under each post (or wherever you put the php call). This might not sound like much, but Related Posts does a few helpful things at once for your blog. First, bounce rate is decreased on individual posts pages because the visitor sees related posts that will keep them reading on the blog. Second, this promotes better internal linking and traffic flow within your site. Pretty damn nifty, eh?

7. Google Sitemaps Generator Plugin - This plugin creates a google compatible sitemap, as well as pinging the webmaster tools service so that you can provide an easier crawling experience for Googlebot.

8. Gallery 2 Blog - This is another great service by Twan that allows you to create and feed your own RSS feeds. It’s simple to use - all you do is import a list of FHGs. The script will generate thumbnails (that look pretty nice, I have to say) and will allow you to set up a specific template for the blog posts. Then you can just go through, add some sentences to the default descriptions, and send the feed off to populate your blogs. It can automatically feed Thumblogger blogs, but the feeds are compatible with most RSS parsing software.

9. Social Poster - This is not a social bookmarking auto poster, but what it does do is help you submit a lot easier to the various adult social bookmarking sites out there. While I prefer to keep my own list of social sites, this can be helpful if you’re just starting out.

10. All in One SEO Plugin - I used to use 5 separate plugins for making Wordpress SEO friendly out of the box. Now, I use one - this plugin is great and you don’t really have to do much more than activate it.

11. Ping O Matic - There are lots of different pinging software out there - but I’ve always just used Ping O Matic to hit the standard list up. I tried refining a ping list a long time back, but except for one or two places it was mostly useless.

There are probably some that I am missing, but it’s rather late at night so my brain isn’t working completely. :)

Paid Tools for Adult Bloggers

While there are a plethora of free tools out there, some of the most useful ones are these paid tools. As a disclaimer, yes there are ref codes (why not put them in?) but feel free to strip them out if you really want to - all of the following are products I heavily endorse and want to support one way or another.

1. Hosthead - I love them. I love them for the amazing dedicated server they have me on, I love them for the near instant, quality support they have been giving me for almost a year now, and I love the fact that I’ve had no downtime other than that which I have caused myself. Feel free to contact me if you’d like to test loading and download speeds off a few of my sites - I’m more than happy to show anyone how great Hosthead is.

2. kaktusan’s Scripts - This guy has made a ton of very neat, time saving scripts that will help you out in your blogging travels. You can find full information on his site, as going over each of these would take up a bit too much space here - but needless to say, I use and love them:
Blogs Automator
Blogs Organizer
Links Organizer
Rocket Pinger
Gallery Scraper
Feeds Observer
Site Organizer
Tradezilla

3. SEO Book - Now, I’m not usually one for buying ‘guru’ books or anything like that. But the SEO Book (and site) is chock full of great information on all things SEO. That and I like books that get updated all the time.

Hopefully this article helps you out in your search for great blogging tools. I’ll update it once I’ve figured out what I’ve forgotten exactly.

I’m working on updating my review site, and part of that process for me is to line up sites for listing / short reviews prior to doing a full review. I’ve been going over a few of the site selection, and I just keep seeing things that drive me nuts on tours. Of course there’s all the usual traffic leaks and other annoying crap off my affiliate links, but I’ll ignore that for now.

Tour Annoyances

Instead, I’m going to embrace my surfer side for a moment (scary, I know) and talk about how goddamn annoying some of this stuff is. The first big thing I noticed - no Join link to hit immediately. If I’ve been presold on the stuff, either by a review or a gallery or what have you, I don’t want to go through a tour. I want to buy it right now, and when I have to either actively search for the join link because it’s hidden somewhere, or click through 15 pages of tour - you can guess that my desire to buy has gone significantly down.

Second are all the sites that don’t bother to tell me how much their membership options are. I’m sure someone thought that was a good idea, and it’s not as big a turn off as the first complaint. However, I hate having to click on pay by credit card when I have no idea how much it’s going to be. Obviously the price point can be indicated in the presell that sent them to the site, but how many people are actually going to remember that?

Going off the second point, having to give ANY type of information prior to actually being told how much I will be paying is ridiculous. Whoever thought that was a good idea is out of their minds.

Flash based sites get my ire a lot because 9 times out of 10, the flash does nothing to enhance the site functionality. This holds true for tours, where I have to wait for the flash to load up and play before I even get a chance to go on the tour. Don’t make me wait, you can have all the flash you want but at least include an alternative navigation bar in the footer.

Members area sections that are shown on the tour (such as those that just use the same layout from tour to member area) that make you repeatively click cancel just to stop the login prompt. If I want to get off, the last thing I want to deal with is clicking by your sidebar links by mistake and having a login popup not want to go away. At the very least, just let it go to server 401 after the first try. What would be even better is if your 401 errors go to your join page (with the bloody price on it!!!!!!)

Member Area Annoyances

This is a fun one. Consider that maybe I’ve signed up even after jumping through some of the hoops above. One thing I’m amazed at - how many sites seem to have their member’s area on a much crappier server than what their tour is on. Do you really think people are just going to ignore the fact that it takes forever to load up the content?

Not making it easy to see the latest updates is another great trick. On one site I went through several sections that haven’t been updated in months (there’s a great impression to keep the surfer there) before I finally found where their weekly update was. Don’t make me dig.

These next few are more of a personal preference than anything else, but I do see these options on a lot of sites. When I get these little features taken away after having the convenience on other sites, it tends to bug me just a little bit. Zipped photo sets, high and low quality movies (or just downloadable movies in general), search with many different categories to narrow things down, and paginated and breadcrumb browsing. It’s funny how these simple little things can improve the browsing experience so much and make me want to stick around.

Proper navigation is one feature that far too many sites seem to overlook. Here’s a little tip - making your stuff harder to browse through doesn’t make the surfer stay longer to try to wade through it all with awkward browsing. They just go to your competitor. For the love of God, list your major sections on a top or sidebar. If you want to include sub categories under the sections, that’s just gravy.

I’ve been working on a retro porn themed side project. I ended up going through a lot of sponsor sign ups in order to find exactly what I was looking for. Along the way I ended up with a lot of programs that offered little to no promotional content or broken content links. I figured I should share this list with anyone who is looking for promote the lovely niche of vintage and retro porn. If I’ve missed programs, please leave me a note in my comments or at my email selenia AT shadow-moon.com. Please note that promotional material information only pertains to the sites that I list - the programs may have different promo material for other sites. This list is in no particular order - newest additions will be at the top!

(This list is getting huge and I want to add in vintage articles/content providers/review/tgp/LL etc so I’m branching this out into its own site, Vintage Resource. The resources at Vintage Resource will be kept up to date, although I will update the list here when I get a chance.

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This is just a quick list of interesting tutorials, how-tos, and FAQs on advanced wordpress topics. These aren’t your normal wordpress walkthrus - these links cover extremely specialized wordpress solutions. It gives you a sense of how versatile this little piece of open source software is, doesn’t it? I’ll be adding to this list as I see topics that interest me. Enjoy!

Conditional Tags
Customizing The Loop
Customizing Wordpress Feeds
Integrate Wordpress into existing website
Converting web templates to Wordpress themes
Running a magazing/news/ezine with Wordpress (displaying posts by category in sections)
Integrating a forum with Wordpress
How to Use Wordpress for a Portfolio Site Part 1 and 2
Customizing Permalink Structure
Wordpress Helper Sheet for Theme Designers
Using Floats and Clear to Make Post Rows

As far as I know, I’ve gotten around to all clients with active or pending projects. I’ve been on my back most of last week (and not in the good way). Seems that this is going around and it’s not too pretty.

I’m slowly getting up to speed - I’m shaking off the last effects and should be all set in a few days.

A few quick updates:
Nastygraphix has launched version 2.0 of the site - and they had me tag along to write the copy. These guys are incredibly talented web designers and incredibly fun to work with.

My MMOEPG article in Klixxx will be in the upcoming October issue. I’m not sure when the CMS article will show itself but trust me, it’s coming!

I’m finishing up a few other projects as well as working on the portfolio coding (once again) for the site. If all goes well, I should have a recent projects script updating on the front page. If all doesn’t go well - the site will probably explode. Either way it’ll be fun.

Speaking of updates, have you considered converting your table based layouts to CSS? There are many benefits in switching to CSS:

..etc etc. You can find out more about the application of CSS in specific adult applications over at Carpe Jugular (awesome awesome resource). A few articles I’d recommend starting off with would be TGP Makeover , 3 Column Search Engine Friendly Layout, and CSS Basic Page Structure.